South African producer Helena Spring (“Yesterday”) has just bought the film rights to “Zoo City,” Lauren Beukes’ 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award winner,. a gritty urban noir fantasy about a woman who carries a sloth on her back, writes email scam letters, and has an ability to find lost things. When she’s hired by a reclusive music producer to track down a missing pop star, she hopes it’s her ticket out of the slum she calls home.

American producer Kisha Cameron-Dingle, director of the Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program who also has a first-look deal with the studio, has scooped up the rights to Nigerian author Nneki Okorafor’s 2011 World Fantasy Award winner “Who Fears Death?,” a coming-of-age fantasy story, set in a rural Africa far in the future, where a female sorcerer reshapes the dystopian desert landscape — Cameron-Dingle described it as “?’Lord of the Rings’ in Africa.”

Kenyan Wanuri Kahiu (“From a Whisper,” “Pumzi”) is slated to write and direct Who Fears Death?” while Beukes, an experienced TV writer, has first look to adapt the “Zoo City” screenplay.

Cameron-Dingle and South African producer David Horler are also developing “Tok Tokkie,” a futuristic Cape Town ghost thriller written by Jenna Bass, a graduate of both Africa First and Story Camp, Focus Features’ invitation-only laboratory and workshop for projects under $1 million. “Tok Tokkie” won the 2010 Durban FilmMart, taking home the Hubert Bals Fund Award of €5,000 ($6,700) for the most promising African project.

Told from the POV of a ghost, “Tok Tokkie” is the furthest along of the three projects: it has local production funding from the National Film and Video Foundation, and is looking for additional money to shoot in 2012, with Bass directing.

A number of other South African genre projects are also under way. The first to shoot is likely to be Etienne Fourie’s “The Windmill,” a love story about a small group of aging friends who discover that the water pumped into a pond by an old windmill restores youth, but only temporarily, and with unexpected consequences. ZenHQ Films produces.